Hi,
Having problems running the app on a Win 7 machine. This machine is being used as a remote, my Core machine is running Win 8.1 and besides the JRiver issues I’ve reported, the app is running fine and this PC has not crashed - i7 CPU.
The Win 7 machine’s processor is a Haswell i3-4130T CPU (2.90GHz) w/ 16GB 1600MHz, low-latency RAM, a 128GB SSD and a Z97-based Motherboard. I run this PC headless.
I’ve looked at your hardware requirements and you recommend an i5, but I’ve also seen that you’ve tested it on other machines from 2010, so I would think that this PC shouldn’t be having these issues.
When using either JRiver, I have small hiccups during playback and then the machine will crash after 10-15 minutes of playback. Using my DACs USB driver, I don’t have the hiccups, but the crashes occur.
I have no problems with playback or the PC crashing when using JRemote and JRiver for playback.
When using either JRiver, I have small hiccups during playback and then the machine will crash after 10-15 minutes of playback. Using my DACs USB driver, I don’t have the hiccups, but the crashes occur.
Just to clarify, you’re using the JRiver WDM driver with Roon in this situation, right?
It happens regardless of which driver I use – JRiver WDM or the Schiit Audio Gen 3 USB (WASPI) – and, yes, I’m getting the blue screen of death
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033
Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: 50
BCP1: FFFFF8800976E818
BCP2: 0000000000000001
BCP3: FFFFF80003181A00
BCP4: 0000000000000000
OS Version: 6_1_7601
Service Pack: 1_0
Product: 256_1
In Windows, the blue screen of death indicates a kernel or driver bug–it’s the consequence of crashing in kernel space. Roon does not include any components that run in kernel space.
I spent most of the afternoon experimenting with the JRiver WDM driver and helping Roon work better with it. I’ll do a more detailed update in the JRiver thread later, but I observed was the JRiver WDM driver causing a blue screen of death with four different underlying drivers (both ASIO and WASAPI). I was using Roon and Foobar2000 to generate the audio stream, and both were able to provoke the blue screens.
I have not yet seen a crash with Roon talking directly to WASAPI, but it’s certainly possible that the driver has a bug and that Roon is indirectly triggering it.
I would encourage you to reach out to Schiit and report that their driver is bluescreening–they may want to gather some information from your machine to help them debug. No matter how an app behaves, it’s no excuse for a driver to take down the whole machine. I’m pretty sure that JRiver is already aware that their driver has issues.
We are going to reach out to Schiit too and request some hardware samples for testing. It would be great to get some of their products into our regular QA rotation, as they seem to be pretty popular.
One improvement in the pipeline that may help is Roon’s upcoming support for WASAPI “Event Driven Mode”. We are using “Push Mode” at the moment because it is supported by all WDM devices (“Event Driven Mode” is only supported by most devices, with some older devices not making the cut). We’re going to release this as a configuration option, so you will be able to experiment with turning it on and off and see if it impacts your stability. “Event Driven Mode” is the default in JRiver, so this option will enable you to make Roon behave more like JRiver.
The work to enable “Event Driven Mode” is done, it just needs to go through our qa-alpha-beta process–so it’s a few days out, but not long.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for the quick response and the detailed explanation. A few comments,
JRiver works fine with the Schiit driver in my main system. I have been running music through JRiver for the past 24 hours on the audio PC and it hasn’t crashed once. However, Roon is not stable using either driver.
Roon works fine with the JRiver WDM in my desktop system on my i7 machine using an Ayre QB-9 DSD DAC - no blue screen of death, not once. The JRiver WDM driver is also stable when I use it with Sony products like Vegas Video 13.
the Gen 3 driver from Schiit is currently only used with their latest DAC - “yggy” and, since it was only released a couple of weeks ago, there are only a couple hundred of these DACs in the wild
While I’m not having any “blue screen of death” problems with my desktop system, I hope the WASAPI changes solve this problem in my main system. I’m doing the 14 day trial (signed up on day 1) and if I can’t use my audio PC with Roon, then I’m going to have to cancel before my subscription kicks in. thanks.
In an attempt to stop my audio PC from crashing, I upgraded to Win 8.1 this afternoon. Now I can’t get Roon to play on the PC at all using the Schiit USB driver. If I select an album and press “play”, all the song titles just fly by in the “now playing” window and then nothing. As a comparison, JRiver is playing fine with the Schiit driver.
Brian -
I’m still having problems with the new build…Roon still won’t play using the Schiit USB driver; it just skips through the songs - works the same using files from my NAS or tracks from Tidal.
If there is any good news, the upgrade to Win 8.1 is preventing the PC from doing the blue screen of death.
Wanted to give you some feedback on the new build w/ the Schiit USB driver - short answer, it works great with Redbook and most hi-rez files, but apparently it won’t play 176.4/24 files.
I can play “Thriller” fine on my Ayre DAC, but it causes the Roon player to freeze up when trying to play on my Schiit DAC.
